


i used to be a baker

by twistofpayne



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Alternate Universe - No One Direction, Fluff, M/M, Mentioned Niall Horan, Mentioned Zayn Malik, Neighbors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-26 17:55:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15006242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistofpayne/pseuds/twistofpayne
Summary: It's the third time this month that Harry's upstairs neighbor has set off the fire alarm in his flat, and Harry decides to take matters into his own hands. Turns out the new neighbor is a bit more mouth-watering than he expected.





	i used to be a baker

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheMipstaz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMipstaz/gifts).



“Not again,” Liam hisses, barely audible even to himself over the shrieking smoke alarm. He drops the skillet and it clangs loudly against the stovetop, flinging bits of remoulade and tarragon onto the backsplash, the other burner, and his exposed forearms. “Damn,” he groans, now thoroughly disgruntled by the cacophonous alarm, his singed armhair, and hazy kitchen fogged by burning zucchini.

This is his third attempt this month to recreate a dish from the Jamie Oliver cookbook that Niall had given him last Christmas, and the third time the alarm has humiliated him into his defeated routine: He cracks open the tiny window above the sink, props the door ajar with a loose shoe, and grabs a clean cutting board to begin fanning the smoke from his flat. Old-fashioned air-con. The building is ancient enough that the landlord had laughed in Liam’s face when he’d had asked about central air. Not that Liam really expected much; it was clear from the Craigslist posting that the landlord was desperate and looking for an equally desperate tenant. So two months ago Liam had squeezed all his belongings up two flights of stairs into 3B and attempted to carve out a home amongst the yellowed wallpaper, dingy florescent lights, a testy cooker and over-active smoke alarm.

Adding insult to injury was the serene voice drifting from the speakers of his laptop, instructing him how to identify the best zucchinis in supermarket bins for use in creamy sauces as opposed to oily ones. With his arms occupied by waving the cutting board, Liam squints across the kitchen to calculate the optimal moment to pause the video between his wild flaps of the cutting board, and it’s only then that he catches sight of the dark figure in his doorway that’s definitely not the right shade of ugly yellow wallpaper to belong there. He starts, nearly losing his grip on the cutting board but managing to cling quickly to it at the last second, enough to stop it from flying into the man’s face. Because it is _definitely_ a man, but a strange one. Liam’s eyes sweep up the man’s frame - made longer by black skinny jeans, made leaner by an oversized hoodie - and rests on jade green eyes burning (visible from two meters away) with a luster of barely concealed impatience.

“Hey-o,” Liam stutters, more in surprise than in greeting.

“Cheers,” the man replies, catching Liam further off guard with the speed of the response. “Did you know your alarm’s going off?”

His voice is deep, deeper than Liam would have expected for his almost-slight build, but clipped with the same irritability of his narrowed gaze. 

“Oh,” Liam stammers again, and feels himself flush with embarrassment. He hasn’t managed to meet any of his neighbors yet, but clearly this intruder is one of them. He lowers the cutting board to his waist, as if it’s a shield between them. He lifts his chin to speak over the blaring alarm. “Er, I suppose you can hear it when I prop open the door.”

The man nods and his chestnut curls flop forward into his eyes. It strikes Liam as an undignified motion by an otherwise pompous solicitor. “A bit,” he answers. “Oh, and the six times before that, too.”

Liam winces. He hates upsetting people, and even more so he hates knowing that he’s upset people unintentionally. Zayn calls it a personality flaw (even though Niall tries to shush him every time): Liam likes to be liked and takes great pains to accomplish that. And there’s the added annoyance that now that he’s over the shock of finding this stranger in his flat, he can’t take his eyes off of those angled cheekbones, or the twisted curl of his judgmental smirk, or most of all the wide-set green eyes that make Liam feel out of breath in his own home.

He nods once in reply, hoping his ears aren’t as visibly red as they feel. “Right, reckon I’m sorry about that.” He arranges his lips into what he hopes is a meek smile, conscious that he’s apologizing over the noise of the still-shrieking smoke alarm. “Won’t happen again, mate.”

Just his luck - the alarm ceases blaring while Liam is mid-sentence, but he isn’t quick enough on the reaction and so the last two words sound like they’re shouted over the newfound quiet. He knows his ears are scarlet now, and beneath his embarrassment he desperately hopes his apology is enough to excuse the disgruntled neighbor from his flat.

But the man doesn’t move, just stands in the entryway with one hand on the brass doorknob and the other on his hip.

Awkward silence falls--or it would, if not for the contrived voice of the earnest vlogger still emanating from Liam’s laptop, now lecturing on the proper way to slice zucchini halves. 

“Grip the zucchini firmly,” the female voice commands, Irish accent audible from the few words. “I find it best to grip the head to minimize any slippage. Make sure you’ve got a sharp knife--”

Liam breaks in to interrupt the monologue’s mortifying entendre (because with a face like that, how can Liam _not_ let his mind wander at the mention of firm gripping?). “I’m a bit too novice to be amateur,” he says quickly as he turns to the opposite counter to pause the video. Before he can, the man takes two long strides into the room and beats him to the laptop. 

Liam is so jarred by the boldness of his neighbor that he barely hears the words coming from his mouth. “Er, what?” he asks, eyebrows furrowed.

“I said, is that Kelly Parker?” The man bends forward at the shoulder to lean closer to the screen.

“Er...” Liam begins. “Y-yes, it is.”

“My mum used to watch her on the telly all the time growing up,” the neighbor says conversationally, his irritated tone dissolving into one of reminiscence. “I’d no idea she was on YouTube.”

“Yeah?” Liam says, clinging to the man’s change in mood. “My friend Niall put me on to her. He’s Irish, too. Reckon that’s how he found her.”

The man tilts his face a half-inch to the left to survey Liam out of the corner of his eye. He says nothing, so Liam rushes to fill the silence. “Do you cook too, then?”

“I dabble.” He turns back to the video and reaches up with one long-fingered hand to pause the video before Kelly Parker can finish dicing her remaining zucchini. He pivots on one heel to scrutinize the battle-weary stovetop. Picking up a serving spoon, he pokes at Liam’s remoulade, which has turned the color and texture of day-old mud. “What have we here, Shep?”

Abashed, Liam rotates the slightly sodden Jamie Oliver cookbook and points to the recipe. The man pokes at Liam’s sauce again and clucks his tongue. “Too much cornstarch, I think.”

“It’s supposed to be thick,” Liam gives a halfhearted defense.

“Right, well, we’ll just have to start from scratch, won’t we?”

Liam’s mind screeches to a halt - _‘start from scratch?’_

And then - _‘We?’_

“Yes, we,” the man replies. Liam clamps his mouth shut, realizing he had voiced that last thought aloud. “I’m Harry, by the way.” He -- Harry -- doesn’t turn to face Liam, doesn’t offer a hand to shake, and so it takes Liam a second to realized it was supposed to be an introduction.

“...Hi, I’m Liam.” Liam says, trying his best to adapt to the notion of introducing himself to someone _after_ they’ve made themselves at home in his kitchen.

“I rather like my quiet, so I’m going to teach a you a bit. Let’s set off that alarm a bit less, mm?” Harry reaches up to rifle through the cabinets over the cooker.

Liam nods, resolving to hide his bewilderment by the appearance and authority of his new neighbor. “... Right. Uh, thanks loads, I guess. Are you right next door, then?”

Still shifting aside bottles of olive oil and curry, Harry shakes his head. “Downstairs, in 1D.”

Liam grimaces. “You can hear the alarm all the way down there?”

“Like I said, I like my quiet. D’you have any apple cider vinegar?”

“Ehm, no,” Liam replies, scanning the closed cabinets as if a bottle might materialize out of thin air. Not that he’s entirely sure what apple cider vinegar is.

Harry stops rummaging through Liam’s supplies and rocks back onto his heels. “Not a problem, we can just nip down to mine. Grab the terragon, will you, Shep? And the recipe.”

Before Liam has time to argue, Harry scoops up the defrosted salmon and the remaining stick of butter and disappears down the hall, leaving Liam standing mutely in the kitchen. It’s like a hurricane had descended on his flat in one second and disappeared the next.

He briefly considers staying here, hiding away behind a more carefully locked door from now on, but as if on cue, there’s a thump and a muffled yell from his upstairs neighbor. He cranes his neck and looks upward at the ceiling. There’s no way to hide from any of his neighbors, not with walls and floors this thin. And besides... Harry may be a hurricane, but he was a rather fit one. Liam chuckles to himself at the last image of Harry’s curls flopping forward as he whirled out the door.

And, more practically, he thinks as he gathers up the herbs to stack on top of the Jamie Oliver book, Harry is now holding his dinner hostage. He stifles a grin as he locks his door and descends the stairs to Harry’s flat.

Whatever he was expecting Harry’s flat to be decorated, this isn’t it. Almost every surface is covered in Persian rugs, crocheted doilies, hand-stitched throw pillows on the velvet couch. There’s a light smell of incense and... something sweeter that Liam doesn’t recognize but is what he imagines lavender smells like. The walls and ceiling are draped with LED lights, but soft ones that give off the dim aura of twilight.

“In here, Shep” Harry’s tenor floats out from the room to Liam’s left. He ducks his head through a bead curtain and finds himself pressed up against Harry in the kitchen. It would have been larger than Liam’s but for the extra counter space Harry has added in the form of wheeled carts and fold-out boards that descend from the walls. It’s cramped, hot, and smells delicious.

Harry is already working at the same busied pace that he was in Liam’s apartment. Something liquid sizzles in the cast iron skillet and Harry’s elbow pumps rhythmically up and down while he slices the heads off of a stand of asparagus. Liam watches, mesmerized, as Harry nimbly tosses the heads into the frying pan before turning back to Liam. “Got to start with an oil base, because asparagus carries the oil better than a cream or tomato sauce,” he explains. He wipes his hands on a houndstooth-patterned rag. “Now, I’m out of Merlot, but I do have a nice Riesling if you’d rather.”

“Er,” Liam starts, but Harry is already lifting a bottle down from the rack on the wall and digging for a corkscrew in a drawer that rattles with silverware. “Thanks.” While Harry pours, Liam lifts his gaze to the walls - all cupboards are bursting with tins, spices, wall-mounted herbs, the occasional stick of Toblerone. “You’ve got so much,” he marvels.

Harry grins down at the bottle now burbling its contents into a stemless wine glass. “I used to be a baker.”

Unsure how to respond, Liam gestures ambiguously to the ingredients stacked on Harry’s countertop. “Thanks for this. When I saw you in the doorway, I expected you to box my ears. I didn’t quite expect you to be kind enough to give me a cooking lesson.”

“I didn’t either, to be honest,” Harry responds and hands Liam the wine glass. “I couldn’t help but fall for those confused puppy dog eyes.”

Liam chokes on the Riesling slipping down his throat. Eyes burning, he wipes his lips and stares at Harry. “My what?”

Harry’s put on what Liam can only describe as a simper. “ _Please_ , Shep. I can only handle so much innocence in one evening.” His eyes seem to dance in the dim kitchen.

Shep. Liam just now realizes that Harry’s been affectionately been referring to him with a canine nickname this whole time. He blinks again, and Harry’s tone softens. “Am I reading this wrong? I thought that zucchini video was such a blatant come-on.”

“I--” Liam’s voice falters, halved by the distance that Harry closes between them. He lifts one long, ringed finger and runs it over Liam’s bottom lip where the wine has left a syrupy stain. Liam’s throat is tight and he doesn’t think it’s the Riesling.

Harry’s so close that Liam can see flecks of hazel in the green. His ears feel as scarlet as they did in his own flat, once again flustered by the rangy neighbor with the hungry look. It’s not unwanted, but it’s surprising. Liam’s always fallen for the old-fashioned types, the brooding gentlemen who open car doors for him, not beaded curtains.

“Yeah?” Harry intones, goading Liam to speak.

His eyes rake up Liam’s face and Liam’s lips separate, almost unconsciously. “Yes,” Liam says. One word, issuing from his throat as easy and effortless as a breath. It doesn’t even make sense as an answer, but it doesn’t matter. They both know what it means.

“Yeah?” Harry drawls again, the smirk audible in his voice. His hot breath is on Liam’s neck, and Liam’s entire body feels as if it’s a pillar of fire, a pillar of uncontrolled, sudden, and befuddling _want_. Harry’s hair tickles his nose. Liam sucks in breath sharply, inhaling the warm scent of butter, tarragon, Riesling, and a hint of smoke.

Above their heads, the fire alarm goes off.

**Author's Note:**

> Please drop a note if you enjoyed! xx


End file.
